Steve Trimble The U.S. Navy is set to decide a path forward after two rounds of protests have delayed the Next-Generation Jammer Low-Band program.
Steve Trimble
L3Harris Technologies won a four-year competition to field a Next-Generation Jammer Low-Band pod for the Boeing EA-18G Growler.
A 10-month legal battle over a $496 million contract for a critical airborne jamming pod faces a key decision point within the next week.
On or before Oct. 18, U.S. Navy officials expect to file a sealed status report on the Next-Generation Jammer Low-Band (NGJ-LB) program in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, according to a legal filing.
NGJ-LB needed to counter low-frequency threats
The document will carry a decision on whether Naval Air Systems Command (Navair) will honor the NGJ-LB contract awarded last December to L3Harris Technologies or heed a two-month-old recommendation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to reopen the contract to competing bids from L3Harris and Northrop Grumman.
A decision either way could take several months to adjudicate, adding further delays to an already lengthy process to field a pod that the Navy deemed essential for countering certain low-frequency radar threats, including China’s duo of L-band tracking radars: the sea-based Type 518 and the land-based SLC-7.
Seeking to break the legal logjam, L3Harris sued the Navy in the Court of Federal Claims in early September. Although seemingly a hostile act, L3Harris executives say their goal in filing the appeal is not intended to be punitive. Rather, they want to prevent another round of GAO protests by Northrop if the Navy decides by Oct. 18 to move forward on the original contract award.
Any follow-up decision by the appeals court in L3Harris’ favor could “trump another GAO protest,” Dana Mehnert, president of L3Harris’ Communications Systems division, tells Aviation Week. The protest process has “already cost the Navy 10 months of delay in starting to get this capability out to the fleet,” he adds.
But Northrop contends that the GAO’s review found the L3Harris proposal “technically deficient.” The company says: “It is unfortunate that L3Harris’ decision to litigate the GAO’s decision may delay and disrupt the Navy’s implementation of the corrective action the GAO recommended to ensure a fair competition for this important technology.”
Protests over the NGJ-LB award started on Feb. 1. Northrop filed an unclassified protest against the award to the GAO, alleging that a former Navair employee had a conflict of interest. Northrop also lodged an unrelated classified protest, claiming Navair overlooked a deficiency in L3Harris’ bid.
GAO officials initially rejected Northrop’s protests; meanwhile, the Navy decided to internally investigate Northrop’s allegations. A month later, Navair reported that it found no evidence to support Northrop’s claims. As a result, Northrop filed a second round of protests to the GAO, which were sustained by the watchdog agency in an Aug. 18 decision.
Navair did not avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest during the source selection process, according to GAO. In the same month that Navair released the requests for proposals, a Navy employee who worked on the solicitation applied for and accepted a job at L3Harris. But the employee did not recuse himself, the GAO says. Although the Navy’s internal investigation cleared the employee of wrongdoing, the GAO recommends that the Navy open an independent investigation and reopen the contract to revised bids.
But Mehnert dismisses the GAO’s concerns about the conflict of interest. The former Navy employee is working in L3Harris’ space business, not the units involved in the NGJ-LB competition, Mehnert says. Moreover, the specific office involved belongs to a part of L3Harris that had teamed up with Northrop to win the NGJ-LB contract, he adds.
“If anybody should have filed a protest, it probably should have been me,” says Mehnert, whose Communications Systems division won the contract.
The details of Northrop’s classified protest have not been fully released. A redacted version of L3Harris’ 85-page complaint filed in the Court of Federal Claims offers some information. The GAO overruled the Navy’s technical experts and changed a “significant weakness” attributed by the Navy to the L3Harris proposal into a “deficiency,” according to the court document.
Mehnert declines to discuss the specific classified details, but says that the GAO’s determination still would not affect Navair’s overall evaluation of the two proposals.
“It’s hard to imagine you would get such a dramatic change [in the overall scores],” Mehnert says. “If there was a change, you’d see it around the edges.”
Ultimately, the Navair evaluation scored L3Harris’ $544.4 million proposal as “outstanding” with a “moderate” risk level, according to L3Harris’ redacted complaint. The same evaluation rated Northrop’s $496 million proposal as “unacceptable,” along with an “unacceptable” risk level, the L3Harris filing shows. In the end, the Navy’s evaluation was binary: finding L3Harris’ bid as “awardable,” but Northrop’s proposal as “not awardable.”
